Now that the Polls feature has been extended to allow more than 12 responses, it's possible to have a proper Myers-Briggs survey that allows you to select any one of the 16 recognized MB types.

If you know the type pattern to which you feel the closest, you can select it here now. And when you're done, the Myers-Briggs Personality Types thread is available for you to comment in further.

And to reiterate the caveat from the previous version: For those who feel the Myers-Briggs model specifically or personality assessment generally are utterly broken, or who don't think your preferred style is represented adequately by the 16 Myers-Briggs types, please select the hidden "I choose not to participate in this poll" option. This isn't to reject the folks who score somewhere in the middle on one of the four spectra that produce the 16 type combinations. It's just that this poll structure isn't capable of handling in-between cases.

Note: This is just for fun. No personal information is being collected, and the aggregate information is not to be wielded against any forum member.

Here's what I think, based on some years of observation and thought: yes and no.

No, in that the deep human motivations appear to be innate; your brain chemistry pumps out particular kinds of chemicals that predispose you to one of a few primary interests, generally giving you a particular worldview. That changes a little as you mature and age, and it can be altered by severe trauma, but for most people it's fairly constant.

And yes, in that personality isn't just what you're born with; you're also the sum of all your experiences through life. Personality = innate character + learned habits.

A lot of argument has happened over the exact balance of character and habits, or "nature versus nurture" as it's ben called for years. I think fussing over that is pointless; it's sufficient to appreciate that both processes apply to some extent in everyone, and that you're not going to understand a person individually or people in large numbers if you only see humans as fully controlled either intrinsically by their built-in motivations or extrinsically by "society." The truth is somewhere in between those extremes.

For Myers-Briggs results, there are a couple of really important things to bear in mind:

1. The sixteen types are just abstracted patterns, which were derived from looking at a lot of data of how people described themselves. What that means is the types are useful when you're trying to understand numbers of people -- the patterns will emerge -- but it's a mistake to pick a random person and expect them to fit neatly into one of the 16 patterns. They might. Or they might not; individuals have a wide range of possible behaviors. If you do fit neatly into one of the 16 type descriptions (as I myself do), that can be useful for you... but not everyone does.

2. Because habits are a part of personality, and habits can change, and the MBTI asks questions about behavior as a stand-in for discovering one's basic motivation, the MBTI measures both innate motivations and learned habits. So your MB type can change... but that doesn't mean that your innate motivation, your preferred way of understanding the world, has changed. It may only mean that you've picked up some new experiences and developed new habits for addressing those experiences.

Well having taken several to get a longitudinal average, I decided I would put one more in the dataset. Again, I consistently get a solid iNtuitive and a solid Thinking. Again, I am fairly borderline on the Introversion/Extroversion, this time scoring quite a bit more Extroverted, but fairly even between Judging and Perceiving. So I just put ENTJ because that's what I technically got this time.

Challenging your assumptions is good for your health, good for your business, and good for your future. Stay skeptical but never undervalue the importance of a new and unfamiliar perspective.Imagination Fertilizer
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